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LOS HERMANOS Y LA ÚLTIMA VERÓNICA
A locked, wooden box enticed a young woman’s interest all her life. The day the box revealed its secrets, her heartfelt fears warred with her desire to know the truth. What she learned confirmed her suspicions and opened a bittersweet understanding of the religious brotherhood of Hermanos Penitentes.
Carmen Baca
I HEARD THE FIRST mournful rise of my fatherʼs voice echo down the valley. It was joined by the others almost immediately after, the blending of twelve menʼs baritone, bass, and tenors sounding almost discordant yet harmonic, a distinct trait that made their singing dismal, doleful, even funereal. I’ve heard some compare los Hermanosʼ alabados to Gregorian chants, but I have to say the only characteristic they share is the somberness. The combined voices of los Hermanos in the blackness of the still nights in our little canyon made the hairs on one’s head stand on end—that is how mournful the timbre of their singing struck us listeners. It didnʼt matter that this occasion of their singing occurred at four o’clock in the afternoon. The time made it less frightening though the mystery of their brotherhood still caused an emotional response in me. The tenor matched the words of their alabados, the hymns passed down from generations. Every song reminded us of Christ’s plight on earth at the hands of mankind, and as Lent was a season for reflection on His life, the words contributed to the overall solemnity and sadness of the forty days before Easter.
CRYSTAL CANDLEHOLDER AND CRUCIFIX WITH A STATUETTE OF THE MADONNA AND CHRIST USED BY LOS HERMANOS IN THEIR CEREMONIES.
Listening to the men as they walked in solemn procession from the morada to the capilla on those Lenten Friday afternoons is one of my most precious memories of the brotherhood. Known as losHermanos Penitentes de la Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno (The Penitent Brothers of the Pious Fraternity of Our Father Jesus of Nazareth), los Hermanos had been a part of my life since before my earliest memories of them. I didn’t realize until later that they were our leaders, the descendants of the all-male religious brotherhood who left Spain due to religious persecution. Their cofradía—confraternity—began when their forefathers settled in northern New Mexico in the 1500s. My fatherʼs membership began in the mid-1920s and lasted until the mid ’80s when they disbanded. They were the caretakers of our community, offering spiritual guidance to the inhabitants of the Cañoncito Valley since they lived far from towns and churches. They ensured that the people lived pious and moral lives. They also provided help to those less fortunate or who suffered adversity.
My father and his brethren were the final members of their society. With the coming of the ’50s, the brothers had all moved into the nearest town where they found employment. The wives enjoyed the luxuries of electricity and what modern appliances they could afford, and we children went to the city schools. But the weekends were spent at the ranch. We all returned on Friday nights and stayed through Sunday in the adobe houses the brothers or their fathers or grandfathers had built. With no indoor plumbing and no electricity, those rustic yet cozy casitas welcomed us all back as though we’d never left. The men and their sons worked the land for the livestock they still kept, and the women and their daughters planted and then tended to their gardens and orchards, assuring all the plants and trees would produce food aplenty for drying or canning and preserving to last ’til the following year.
Men and women were eager for the Lenten season, the most active time for both societies. We Verónicas—the female counterpart to the men’s— cleaned the prayer house and the church from ceiling to floor. Every inch had to be scrubbed the week before Lent and kept clean during the forty days because both structures were used every Friday and each day of la Semana Santa, the week between Palm Sunday and Easter. We also prepared the food for the brothers to take and eat in the seclusion of the morada since we were forbidden to go there when they held their meetings and performed their private rituals. We were only allowed to join them when invited to participate in their processions and prayers.
I had barely started school when my mother began including me in doing the quehaceres of the sisterhood, and las Verónicas welcomed me into their fold as the only child among them.
HANDMADE CRUCIFIXES USED BY LOS HERMANOS. ACCORDING TO TRADITION, EVERY MEMBER OF THE BROTHERHOOD HAD TO CRAFT THEIR OWN.
My fondest recollections are of cleaning the morada, the three-room prayer house located at the end of a long road opposite the church. The house had three rooms—the spacious kitchen, a smaller storage room in between, and the largest, the prayer room. I was five when I was assigned to work in the kitchen and the prayer room. “Mira, hija,” my mother instructed me in how to do the chores they assigned me for the rest of my life as a Verónica, “look, daughter, see how I use the butter knife to scrape gently at the wax on the candle holders. This way you do not take off the paint on the wood ones or scratch the glass ones. You have your trabajo cut out for you. Don’t put too many in the cajete at a time when you wash them, either.” The laborious task included the black wooden crucifixes each Hermano made for himself. The men carried their crosses and their prayer books from the morada to the capilla in the processions and back when the church ceremony was over, and they returned in solemn rows of twos. I took special care with those crosses. I was assigned the decorating of both altars, so I had the honor of arranging the altar cloths, the curtains and the paper and plastic flowers that graced the ceiling and the sides, the many candleholders, the statues of the Blessed Mother and the saints, every artifact that went on the altars of both morada and capilla. All were my responsibility for the next twenty-sixyears . Doing so gave me such a satisfaction that los Hermanos would be praying at the altars I designed. If I couldnʼt be one of them, I wanted to do something that made me feel like I was. I did not know back then that I was already becoming a Verónica.
THE MORADA, THE THREE-ROOM PRAYER HOUSE LOCATED AT THE END OF A LONG ROAD OPPOSITE THE CHURCH.
I couldn’t remember at what age I began begging my father to allow me to join his cofradía only to be told again and again that because I was a girl, it could never be. He was Hermano Mayor, the Elder Brother, the leader. I knew his word was the last. That shake of his head never became a nod, and the “No se puede” never turned into “Yes, you can.” But I felt I was one of them when I sat at the wooden trestle table of the cocina, the kitchen where the brothers took their meals, as I performed my tasks before and during Lent. With a newspaper section open to catch the wax as it fell from the candle holders, I took my responsibility seriously because every relic I handled belonged to the brothers. Then I washed each piece carefully in the warm dishwater of the metal washtub set on the floor. I dried them just as delicately. The Verónicas cleaned the rooms, sweeping the cobwebs from the vigas, the logs that held up the ceiling, and sweeping and mopping the wood floor. Every dish and utensil was washed, every piece of furniture cleaned—except a padlocked, wooden box beneath a tall table in the storage room. I never saw anyone touch that.
I was thirteen the day my mother and the vecinas, tías y comadres accompanied me on the solemn occasion when I committed myself to being one of them. I had to accept that, because I was female, I would never accompany my father into the morada after the Stations of the Cross, I would never participate in whatever the brothers did in solitude, and I would never satisfy my curiosity of what exactly did go on there as the rest of us slept. I had to be content to belong to the auxiliary society. What I did not realize then was that I was already beginning to take my place as the last surviving member of the Verónicas because I was the youngest, and it turned out, the last to join. I was to bear a new responsibility later in life, one which I cling to now with a new understanding that comes with age as the last of my kind.
THE LAST PROCESSION OFLOS HERMANOS PENITENTES DE LA FRATERNIDAD PIADOSA DE NUESTRO PADRE JESÚS NAZARENO, IN 1986. MY FATHER IS THE MAN IN THE GREEN JACKET HOLDING THE STANDARD.
When the brotherhood disbanded in the mid-1980s, so did the sisterhood. The last two remaining Hermanos, the few Verónicas, and I gathered for the last time to empty the morada and capilla of the religious artifacts to prevent them from getting stolen. Many abandoned prayer houses and churches were being vandalized and the relics sold by the thieves by then. The question of where to put them arose. All eyes turned to me. My mother asked me formally if I would house them, knowing, as the youngest Verónica, I would be able to keep them longer than anyone else present.
By this time, my husband and I had built our house on the very property where my parents’ first home was, and I had room for everything—minus la Muerte, the skeleton effigy. I refused to offer her sanctuary because of my fear of what she represented. I was ashamed though and relieved she was shrouded in a black cloth. I did not need to see her physically to picture her in my mind, so familiar was she after so many years of my being around her.
Under the material, I knew her skeleton face peered out of the black shawl one of the Verónicas had placed around her head and shoulders. She perched on a stand, her dark dress reaching almost to the floor and covering her misshapen bony feet and the thin sticks that were her legs. The hollow black holes where her eyes should be were so dark they stretched into her skull like endless tunnels. The first and last time I had looked into them scared me so with their empty darkness that I was filled with a hopelessness I hadn’t felt before. I was five. The realization that she represented the end of life for all living beings hit me full force and began the decades-long fear of her that I harbored. Would any sane parent want to bring the personification of death into the house? With two small children who feared my first walking doll— still residing in my closet—I could not ask them to accept that Death would be joining us. Of course, now that she and I are good friends and she no longer frightens me, I regret not offering her a safe haven. Oone of the elder Verónicas took her in, and her daughter cares for her still. I fought tears the day I saw her last because I also bade the last of los Hermanos and Verónicas goodbye.
We were never all together again.
TWO HORSEHAIR SCOURGES AND ONE OF BRAIDED LEATHER WITH KNOTS AT THE ENDS LIKE A CAT-O-NINE TAILS. THEY ARE KNOWN AS LAS DISCIPLINAS AND WERE DISCOVERED IN THE TRUNK THEY ARE RESTING ON.
When we parted ways and I returned home, I washed the relics and artifacts and the santos. I arranged them on an old chest of drawers I use as my own home altar, just like those of my foremothers before me. Then my attention turned to the worn and weathered box, the one that had been locked all my life, the one for which only the Hermano Mayor had the key. That box had held my curiosity for all those years as any forbidden territory would for anyone who wanted to know more about the secrets of any group to which one is excluded. I watched in silent anticipation as my husband carefully broke the lock and opened the heavy lid.
He removed each item one at a time and handed every piece to me reverently. I sobbed again that day like I hadn’t in a long, long time. Each implement the brothers used for performing their penance in the privacy of the prayer house, each shocking relic I had only seen in pictures and books about los Hermanos Penitentes was right there—I was holding them in my hands. The horsehair whip and the leather cat ’o nine tails, the other tools my father and his father and all the past Hermanos used to express their pious and heartfelt sorrow for their sins and to beg forgiveness from the Christ whose life they strived to emulate in their own—the box revealed them all.
Their book recorded the names of officers and their duties, the dues they collected and what they were used for, starting at two cents and becoming fifty cents with the passing of time.
And the most important information I had wanted to know for all those years—the rules which governed their brotherhood—they were in that box. Dated 1850, they revealed the truths my father kept from me as a true, devout Hermano who was sworn to keep all they did within the Brotherhood.
I cried for all that my father endured as the leader of his brotherhood, I think I may also have cried because now I was no longer innocent of their truths, and the reality of what being an Hermano entailed hit me with profound emotion. I know I cried for the end of an era of the most personal and precious moments of prayer I will never experience in the same way again. I remembered el Hermano Mayor’s words when I once asked if he feared death. He said being an Hermano showed him that Santa Muerte would carry him in her carreta upward to his heavenly home because of how he had lived in this life. Eternal rest awaited him in the next and was therefore welcome, not feared.
That was the day I began to change my own relationship with Santa Muerte, aka la Muerte, Doña Sebastiana, and by many other names—the shrouded shell of the woman who accompanies my days now as I, too, welcome the time she determines I will take that final journey by her side. I have felt her beside me from time to time. I feel her presence as I rise with the sore muscles and cracking bones of age, giving thanks to the God who rules over us both for the life I am allowed on this plane. I wonder sometimes when she will take me with her, but I do not dwell on the thought. Just as my father was the last of his brotherhood, I am the last of las Verónicas del Cañoncito de las Manuelitas. I do not fear death. My faith in eternal life gives me comfort.
—Carmen Baca taught a variety of English and history courses, mostly at the high school and college levels, over the course of thirty-six years before retiring in 2014. Her command of both English and Spanish enables her to write with true story-telling talent. Her debut novel El Hermano, published in April of 2017, and became a NM-AZ Book Award Finalist. She has also published two more books and twenty-three short pieces in online literary magazines, women’s blogs, and anthologies. Her fourth and fifth books will publish this year as she works on her sixth.
